Rob :
(laughs) You know it doesn't go down easy, and Romney didn't go down easy, but
Obama goes down smooth when you're taking in all that Republican policy, war,
and bank caretaking, and what have you.

Glen : You
know, beyond war and austerity, we just came across an item from Free Press
that says that Obama's FCC (you know the Federal Communications Commission, is
dominated by whatever president gets to put the majority on there), that the
Obama FCC is now going to resurrect the same consolidating measures that George
Bush's FCC tried to push through in 2003, allowing cross ownership of
newspapers and broadcast media in the top twenty markets; the whole shebang
that sparked a kind of movement against consolidation that swayed the US
Senate. If you remember, back in 2003,
when it was the evil Bush and his evil FCC that was pushing for further
consolidation of media. Well, according
to Free Press, those same measures are now on the agenda for Barack Obama's
FCC, and they're being just as stealthy about it as the Bush FCC was. And, I have a prediction: We won't have that kind of groundswell of
resistance, because it's Obama's FCC.

Rob : And
that's the big problem. We need to get
that resistance going. I did a poll on
OpEd News, which is left of Democrat, asking what people expected from a Lame
Duck Obama if he was elected to a second term, and something like 85% of them
thought he would move further to the right.
What do you think?

Glen : They're absolutely correct, and it's not that
Obama is just some kind of weather vane that moves whichever [way] the wind
blows. Obama really is philosophically a
center-right corporate politician, and we've been saying that ever since before
he was elected. And you know, in the
first couple of months of his regime, even the New York Times described him as
center-right, and this at a time when Democrats controlled both houses of
Congress, when the punditry were reading obituaries over the corpse of the
Republican Party, just as some of them are doing now, when there were virtually
no effective pressures coming from the Right, when Social Security was still
untouchable -- George Bush in his second term having tried his assault on Social
Security and having suffered his worst domestic defeat of his two terms. So Obama could have done just about whatever
in the hell he wanted to do, and we saw what he did. He introduced austerity as the dominant and
current subject of conversation when the Republicans were in no shape to push
for it. He was calling for so-called
entitlement reform in two meetings with the editorial boards of the Washington
Post and the New York Times in the weeks before he even took the Oath of
Office. And he immediately proceeds toward establishing his hand-picked deficit
reduction commission, thereby mandating that austerity would be the reigning
conversation. He did all that by himself
[with] no Republican pressure betraying his own core philosophy. Remember that in early 2008, as the subprime
mortgage crisis started being felt outside of the black and brown ghettos and
barrios, it was Barack Obama who opposed even a voluntary moratorium, much less
a mandatory moratorium on foreclosures, when Hilary Clinton was backing a
voluntary moratorium, whatever the hell that is, and Edwards was calling for a
mandatory moratorium. So, he revealed
himself as the banker's friend, as one who would block any efforts to reign in
the power and privileges of the banks, back in that time, before he was even
elected.

Rob : Alright, so let me take a step back, because
the question I asked you two questions ago was in terms of activism and things
that you're doing, or that you're working on, or seeing even, that will bring
about change.

Glen : Well, despite the bad prognosis (and it is
poor) for any rejuvenation of a broad Progressive movement in the United States
any time soon, that does not lessen the fact that Capitalism is in deep,
profound, and I believe terminal, crisis.
That deterioration of the system, and you know I'm sixty three now, I
never hoped -- even back in the day when I was in the Panther Party -- I really
never believed that I would live to see -- actually, when I was in the Panther
Party, I didn't think I would live to many years at all (laughs)-- but I never
believed that I would live to see the actual fall of US imperialism as the
dominant power in the world, but I think that it just may happen in my
lifetime. So deep are the
contradictions, so frequent are the crises, so short the time between crises in
this system.

Rob : Now
you're talking about Imperialism and Capitalism exchanging the words. Are they the same?

Glen : No,
I'm not. I said US Imperialism. (laughs)

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Rob : At first you said Capitalism is in deep
crisis.

Glen : Well Capitalism is in deep crisis, but I'm
not predicting the end of Capitalism in my life. But US Imperialism, as the military structure
that exists today, guarding the powers that be, the Lords of Capital who are in
charge today, that is on its last legs, although it's going to be a very bloody
end, and there is no guarantee that all of us will survive that demise either.

Rob : And
what is the threat to US Imperialism?
What is eroding it, or conquering it, or causing it to be in crisis?

Glen :
Because with the triumph of finance capital, as with many things in history,
it's very difficult to set a date, even a year, when that was accomplished, but
I think it was pretty definitive by the 1970s, we now have the rule of a class
that creates nothing, that only survives by manipulating markets, a class that
actually inhibits the productive growth of the world, so they can't
compete. And we see these rising
regional powers, specifically the Brick Nations. You know, Brazil's International Development
Agency is bigger than the IMF, and that's just Brazil. And so we see these basically Capitalist
powers, but not headquartered in London and New York and Paris, we see them
overtaking and certainly out-competing the United States and Western
Europe. And increasingly, the only
weapon that they have is the weapon -- all they have is their guns- in Africa,
for example. The United States doesn't
even pretend that it's in a trade war with China and Brazil and India. It's basically abdicated that, after all,
Wall Street -- finance capital - is not engaged in trade. It's engaged in manipulation of currencies,
and directing US militaries to use other means to block the peaceful growth of
trade among nations. So in Africa, we
see the US basically abandoning much of the economic sphere to these rising
regional powers that I've just mentioned, but at the same time strengthening
AFRICOMs penetration of African militaries as well as the actual US presence of
militaries in Africa. And I think that
that's the way we're going to see this play out in general in the world over the
coming years. I'm not even going to
project in times of decades, because the decline is so rapid. And this means that we're going constantly to
have military kinds of crises that scare the hell out of us, but the general
picture of US shrinking Soft Power will increase in pace.

Rob : "The shrinking of American Soft Power." Now, you know, last year I interviewed Joseph
Nye who wrote the book on Soft Power.
He's now editor of the Trilateral Commission. I don't think I'd have gotten him as a guest
once he was Trilateral Commission editor.
So, you see US Soft Power shrinking eh?
Because it seems to me that it is.
And that is why?

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Glen : Yeah, yeah.
Well, because it's economic power is shrinking, and that ultimately is
the Soft Power. Even in terms of what
the United States is trying to project as its moral authority, and that is its
military intervention cloak on Imperialism - even though it's not a member of
the International Criminal Court, the ICC actually is its creature - even that
kind of what they would purport as Soft Power, is actually just a front for US
military power. So we see that,
ultimately, all this moralizing and humanitarian talk that masquerades as Soft
Power and persuasion has to be backed up by the power of NATO, as with the murderous
assault on Libya.

Rob : Let's get back to Capitalism. Now you say "Capitalism is in crisis." Let's talk about that. How is Capitalism in crisis?

Glen : Well, we can see that the lords of capital,
Wall Street, the alternative economy that they have created, actually has an
existence disconnected from the real economy.
And we can see that most starkly in the very existence of derivatives,
whose notional value -- and it's difficult to measure, because they come into
being, and then they go out of existence, and pop up elsewhere -- but the
notional value of derivatives is usually set around six hundred trillion
dollars. The world gross planetary
product is only ninety trillion dollars.
So we have this alternative economy that only the biggest finance
Capitalists can play in, which is seven, eight, nine times as large as the
actual economy of the world. It hangs
over us like a "Sword of Damocles." It
certainly cannot be leveraging six hundred trillion dollars of notional values
on a world economy that is only a very small fraction of that. And it inevitably is going to collapse.

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.